16 SEO FAQs We Still Struggle to Understand

Despite the fact that SEO has now been around for years, many businesses still don’t seem to fully understand how it works and what it does. SEO could be described as the process of getting traffic from the organic search results that can be found on a search engine. For most people, this means Google. The higher up a website ranks on a search engine, the more likely it is that it will receive clicks. Research has shown that the top 5 results on search engines will get 75% of the clicks, so it is a very desirable place to be. Currently, it is an industry that is worth $65 billion and is steadily growing as more and more businesses are now going online.

On Page or Off Page SEO?

One factor that many people get confused about when it comes to types of SEO is what the difference is between on page and off page SEO. On page optimization looks at the internal parts of a website and needs to be constantly updated to be effective. To increase traffic both the content of a site and the HTML source code of a page needs to be optimized. As well as helping a search engine understand what the site is about, it will also help users to understand the site and address quickly whether or not it is relevant to them. The ultimate goal of on page SEO would be to make it easy for both the user and search engine to understand what the web page is about, find pages that are worthy of ranking well on a web page and identify what pages relate to what keyword searches.

Off page SEO is purely external, and to be effective, it relies on other web pages for improvement. Generally, off site SEO is associated with link building, but it can also be a lot more than that, it refers to activities that can be performed outside your website in order to improve your site’s ranking. Some of these methods include link building, social media marketing and social bookmarking. Google ranks a website on how useful it is, and a useful website is more likely to have more references from other websites and mentions from social media. Link building is the more successful of off page SEO methods, each link could also be described as a ‘vote’. The most popular ways to get links could include blog directories, forum signatures, comment links, article directories, link exchange schemes and shares content directories.

With both forms, black hat SEO has started to emerge. This is a type of SEO that is seriously frowned upon in the world of online marketing. Usually, this type is detected and then the company penalized by Google. Google can either ban the website from the search engine entirely or simply move the site down in ranking, somewhere between 10 and 100 positions. One of these improper methods is using paid links.